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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26170282">jason gideon making questionable life choices</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank'>fourshoesfrank</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Criminal Minds (US TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Autistic Jason Gideon, Gen, Im in the Need To Go Somewhere Else stage of quarantine, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, this is half vent fic half escapism, wandering</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 03:28:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,136</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26170282</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fourshoesfrank/pseuds/fourshoesfrank</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>the anonymity of a road trip is addicting. even more so when everybody who's hurt you makes a point of knowing your name.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jason Gideon &amp; The BAU Team</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>jason gideon making questionable life choices</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>All Cops Are Bastards and criminal minds is copaganda. i love the show as much as anybody but we all have to keep that in mind. </p><p>enjoy!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>  Virginia, two nights. It’s a big state, he doesn’t recognize a single face during his time there. The Carolinas, one week. The border between North and South is blurred, meaningless; no one knows him and the beach is fantastic. Nice sun down there. Georgia (three days; amazing peach tea), Alabama (four hours, just a drive by; he’s never driven through Alabama before, always took the jet or the train), (he draws a complete blank trying to recall any part of Mississippi), Louisiana (barely a day; every city feels crowded and judgemental), then back to Alabama (he takes a day to see the sights, this time). </p><p><br/>
  Jason sits on the bed of a hotel room (not a motel, they’ve featured too heavily in the cases he’s worked to ever let him sleep soundly inside one) and he cries. The cheesy postcards he bought from one of a million street vendors crinkle in his back pocket and he cries, because what on Earth was he thinking, buying them in the first place? Who was he going to send them to? </p><p><br/>
  He can see into the room’s tiny bathroom from here on the bed. He can <em>see</em> the bathroom and the bathroom has a <em>mirror</em> and the mirror should be <em>covered</em> because he’s still in <em>mourning</em>, dammit, but there’s nothing here to cover it with... So he cries. The tears blur his vision and he’s so out of it that he finds himself fishing in his pockets for his reading glasses, like that will help fix anything. </p><p><br/>
  He tosses his readers to the floor and hopes they’ve landed lenses up, so they won’t be blurry when he puts them back on. And he cries. </p><p><br/>
  These tears are silent, the way they always have to be in places like this. Cheap, thin-walled apartments, shitty motels with three agents crammed into a single room, even upscale resorts and their hollow attempts to feel ‘homely’. The walls and doors might as well be made of plywood. Jason has overheard many a young, fresh-faced agent sobbing into their pillow after a particularly trying case. </p><p><br/>
  Frank was a trying case. So Jason cries. At some point, he falls asleep, and dreams of Sarah. </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  He wakes up at the crack of dawn, doesn’t order room service, and sits outside in his car until checkout time arrives. He leaves the postcard tucked behind the bathroom mirror, with nothing written on the back. </p><p><br/>
  Out of Alabama, back to Louisiana, because Jason’s not sure if the cities really felt judgemental or if that was just his hypervigilance talking. He makes a beeline for New Orleans, the Big Easy, because it’s early spring and the start of Lent can’t be that far off, right? Mardi Gras is either fast approaching, or he’s just missed it. Either way, it feels like a good time to go. </p><p><br/>
  <em>Good</em> is an exaggeration. It doesn’t feel dangerous, and that’s good enough. </p><p><br/>
  New Orleans, three days; better than he thought it would be but worse than the movies make it seem. The hotel bathroom mirror is set into the door of the medicine cabinet, so Jason drapes a pillowcase over it. </p><p><br/>
  He takes Route 10 up out of Louisiana and into Mississippi where it turns into Route 59, and this time he remembers the state as he drives through it. He’s confident that nobody out here knows him, nobody will alert the BAU to his whereabouts. </p><p><br/>
  Mississippi has nothing to offer except anonymity, which Jason soaks up like a sponge. Every rural gas station where the attendant hasn’t watched the news in fifty years, every roadside diner with a waitress who’s either too young to recognize him or too airheaded to recall his face, every hotel clerk (still no motels) who barely blinks as he rents a room... The rush is unbelievable. Boston doesn’t matter down here. The FBI doesn’t matter down here. <em>Frank</em> doesn’t matter down here. It’s addicting. </p><p><br/>
  He makes every transaction in cash, just in case Penelope Garcia and her all-seeing lines of code are trying to trace him. He makes sure not to get into any altercations, because Jennifer Jareau and her media contacts might put his name into print again. He tries not to plan too far into the future, just in case Spencer Reid and his uncanny affinity for maps try to trace his steps and predict his next move. </p><p><br/>
  Jason loves his team. He also can’t stand the thought of seeing them again. </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  For the next few months, he zig-zags around the South, never allowing himself to travel north of Memphis, just to be on the safe side. Still keeping his head down, still paying with cash, still wondering if his team is actively looking for him. </p><p><br/>
  Jason is in South Carolina when he realizes that even if they (Garcia and Reid, they’re the only ones who would still be looking, be honest) managed to track him down, they would have no way of contacting him. That makes him feel better, the prospect of that uncomfortable conversation being taken off the table. Jason never uses computers and he doesn’t own a cell phone anymore. </p><p><br/>
  A few weeks later, he drives back to Virginia and gets a new credit card. It seems like a good decision, until the very first purchase he attempts to make with said card is declined. He pays in cash again and goes back to the bank to see what’s the matter. </p><p><br/>
  “Sir, I’m sorry about that,” the bank IT manager (name tag Lasandra, African American, probably fresh out of college) says. “We caught somebody looking at your records online and we froze the card just to be safe.”</p><p><br/>
  “Online records?” Jason knows what happened now. </p><p><br/>
  “Yes, sir, the bank’s online database. It’s very secure, we’re still trying to figure out how they got in—“</p><p><br/>
  “What’s the address?” he cuts her off. </p><p><br/>
  “I’m sorry?”</p><p><br/>
  “The, uh, computer address, those numbers that tell you where it is. Do you know where the hacker came from?”</p><p><br/>
  Lasandra nods thoughtfully. “Yeah, actually, that was the weird part. They didn’t try to mask their IP address at all, no proxy servers or encryption or anything.”</p><p><br/>
  “So where was it from?”</p><p><br/>
  “Here in Virginia, sir.”</p><p><br/>
  Ah, yes. She’s still looking for him. Maybe he should send her another MP3 player, or something. </p><p><br/>
  Jason smiles at the IT manager and thanks her for taking precautions, but he reassures her that no further action is necessary. He fields all of her probing questions with ease and leaves the bank (and the city, and the county, and the state) in under an hour.</p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  This trip out of Virginia is short-lived. Jason’s car has been giving him warnings and flashing lights for a month now, because station wagons aren’t meant for constant nomadic use. </p><p><br/>
  He spends a few days in West Virginia and makes only two purchases during that time, at a Wendy’s and a decent hotel. If they’re tracking his card, he doesn’t want them to be worried about him. They’ll worry anyways. </p><p><br/>
  Jason drives back to the cabin and starts looking for work. He doesn’t want an office job, he’d shrivel up behind a desk. He doesn’t want to do any sort of indoor work at all, really. He circles a lawn care advertisement in the paper and gives them a phone call. He gets the job. </p><p><br/>
  Jason does his best not to profile the other employees. He forces himself to think about the grass that needs cutting, or the rock path that needs pressure washed, whenever he catches himself thinking about how the other workers would feature in a case. They’re mostly high school and college kids taking summer jobs (it’s summer; when did that happen?) along with a few older guys like Jason. </p><p><br/>
  He gets himself fired after four months. In hindsight, he’s not sure if he was intentionally sabotaging himself or not... It might’ve been the hypervigilance coming back to bite him once again. That’s all semantics; the real problem is that he’s lost his job. </p><p><br/>
  It was a minor incident, really. Jason didn’t cut down a bush that had a bird’s nest inside it. One bush wouldn’t kill the homeowner, he reasoned, and the birds deserved to hatch their eggs in peace. </p><p><br/>
  He got fired because of those birds. It was worth it. </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  It wasn’t worth it. Jason sits on the floor of his kitchen and cries, because it’s just hit him that somebody else destroyed the nest and the bush and the eggs and the birds after he refused to. It was a stupid move, getting himself fired over some birds that were going to die anyway. </p><p><br/>
  <em>What a sorry excuse for an FBI agent, crying over some damn birds on his kitchen floor, </em>a voice whispers inside Jason’s head. It could be Frank, or Adrian Bale, or Randall Garner, it could be anybody, it could be everybody... </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  When Jason gets up off the floor, he realizes that night has fallen. He stopped crying some time ago, but his nose still feels stuffed up and a small headache has been bugging him off and on for a while. And he can’t stop thinking about that poor little egg. </p><p><br/>
  How many eggs are cracked open every day in the process of keeping suburbia’s lawns presentable? How many birds lose their nests just because a bush needs trimmed, or because a tree’s branches have begun to encroach on the power lines above it? Jason’s no hardcore environmentalist, but the sheer amount of habitats disrupted for the sake of aesthetics is depressing. </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  “Hey Charleston, it’s Tommy bringing you the best of... Hey Lexington, remember to keep those dials locked... How ya doin’, Memphis? Next up is... Don’t go to bed yet, Little Rock, ‘cause we’re about to...”</p><p><br/>
  Jason doesn’t care what the radio plays, just so long as it’s not static. He listens to the oldies (they make him feel old, but that’s alright), the pop stations (they also make him feel old, and this is slightly less alright), the rock stations (classic and modern rock, mostly), the jazz stations (these are his favorite and he laments the scarcity of them), and so many more. Some areas devote entire stations to recordings of the local high school band, which is touching in a way Jason can’t quite explain in words. The radio keeps him company. </p><p><br/>
  He can’t stand the sound of static. (In the Bureau, he had a reputation for hating walkie-talkies.) As he drives farther and farther west, he gets better and better at finding the best time to switch off of a station before his car’s old antenna loses the signal. </p><p><br/>
  He’s headed west, this time, not south. He left his credit card back in the cabin, because he knows that going west is a deviation from his pattern and the team would certainly notice this and they would be concerned and one of them would definitely be foolish and sentimental enough to confront him about it. He knows they all know where the cabin is. So he leaves his credit card behind. </p><p> </p><p>-</p><p> </p><p>  Jason is just passing a large <em>Welcome to Kansas! </em>sign when he realizes that he doesn’t know who’s on the team anymore. Oh, he could make a few educated guesses, profile who’s the most likely to have stayed (Reid, it’s all the kid knows) or who’s the most likely to have left (Prentiss, with her ambition), but he wants—needs—to know. He wonders who they replaced him with. </p><p>-</p><p>  Rossi. It’s all over the radio; every station is talking about David Rossi’s heroic arrest of the Killer Cowboy in Tulsa. Jason has to slow down and pinch himself every time it’s mentioned. Rossi was his replacement. After ten years of (admittedly well-deserved) retirement, the man‘s come back to the BAU. Jason can’t quite wrap his head around it. </p><p><br/>
  How long? Strauss wouldn’t have let the post stay empty for long, but how long did they wait before inviting Rossi in? Maybe he invited himself, that wouldn’t be out of character for Dave... </p><p><br/>
  Jason can’t believe that he hasn’t learned about this until now, four years later. By now, Rossi and the team must know each other, to the point where they shouldn’t be separate entities in Jason’s mind; Rossi is part of the team once again, and Gideon hasn’t been part of the team for a long time. </p><p><br/>
  Sometimes, in the night, he forgets. He catches himself glancing at the clock on the nightstand and calculating how much time he needs to make it to the jet, or reaching into his pocket for his badge when he gets undressed. You can take the profiler out of the job, but you’ll never take the job out of the profiler. Once Jason considers this, he’s no longer all that surprised by Rossi’s decision to go back. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>just for the sake of simplicity i’m going to say that gideon had already paid off the mortgage on the cabin property. i made up the guy that Rossi arrested. remember: All Cops Are Bastards. </p><p>feedback in the form of comments/kudos would be great!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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